The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

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Thursday, October 24, 2013

"Danvers is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts,
United States, located on the Danvers River near the
northeastern coast of Massachusetts. Originally known
as Salem Village, the town is most widely known for its
association with the 1692 Salem witch trials. It is also
known for the Danvers State Hospital, one of the state's
19th-century psychiatric hospitals, which was located here."

"Stevens may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is 'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valery's Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular, in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:

A cold and perfect clarity is a poison impossible to combat. The real, in its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously….[…] To a handful of ashes is the past reduced, and the future to a tiny icicle. The soul appears to itself as an empty and measurable form. –Here, then, things as they are come together, limit one another, and are thus chained together in the most rigorous and mortal* fashion…. O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is.

Valery's formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be cured only by what Valery's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid observer.'" —Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

Monday, October 31, 2005

"An asymmetrical balance is sought since it possesses more movement. This is achieved by the imaginary plotting of the character upon a nine-fold square, invented by some ingenious writer of the Tang dynasty. If the square were divided in half or in four, the result would be symmetrical, but the nine-fold square permits balanced asymmetry."

"'Burnt Norton' opens as a meditation on time. Many comparable and contrasting views are introduced. The lines are drenched with reminiscences of Heraclitus' fragments on flux and movement…. the chief contrast around which Eliot constructs this poem is that between the view of time as a mere continuum, and the difficult paradoxical Christian view of how man lives both 'in and out of time,' how he is immersed in the flux and yet can penetrate to the eternal by apprehending timeless existence within time and above it. But even for the Christian the moments of release from the pressures of the flux are rare, though they alone redeem the sad wastage of otherwise unillumined existence. Eliot recalls one such moment of peculiar poignance, a childhood moment in the rose-garden– a symbol he has previously used, in many variants, for the birth of desire. Its implications are intricate and even ambiguous, since they raise the whole problem of how to discriminate between supernatural vision and mere illusion. Other variations here on the theme of how time is conquered are more directly apprehensible. In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes up an image he had used in 'Triumphal March': 'at the still point of the turning world.' This notion of 'a mathematically pure point' (as Philip Wheelwright has called it) seems to be Eliot's poetic equivalent in our cosmology for Dante's 'unmoved Mover,' another way of symbolising a timeless release from the 'outer compulsions' of the world. Still another variation is the passage on the Chinese jar in the final section. Here Eliot, in a conception comparable to Wallace Stevens' 'Anecdote of the Jar,' has suggested how art conquers time:

Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."

Friday, December 17, 2004

One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.

— Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"

The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin,
who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico:

"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."

"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime…."

"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"

From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times:

"Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."

Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9.

Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:

" 'Nothingness itself nothings' — with these words, uttered by Martin Heidegger in the early 1930s, the incipient (and now-familiar) split between analytic and continental philosophy began tearing open. For Rudolf Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle [Wiener Kreis] of logical empiricists and a strident advocate of a new, scientific approach to philosophy, this Heideggerian proposition exemplified 'a metaphysical pseudo-sentence,' meaningless and unable to withstand any logical analysis. Heidegger countered that Carnap’s misplaced obsession with logic missed the point entirely."
— Review of A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger

"Death and Metaphysics," by Peter Kraus, pp. 98-111 in Death and Philosophy, ed. by Jeff Malpas and Robert Solomon. Heidegger's famous phrase (misquoted by Quine in Gray Particular in Hartford) "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" is discussed on page 102.

Interprets the meaning of terza rima in terms of a temporal pattern of past, present, and future, with which the formal structure and the thematics of the whole poem coordinate homologically: "both the verse pattern and the theme proceed by a forward motion which is at the same time recapitulary." Following the same pattern in the three conceptual orders of the formal, thematical, and logical, the autobiographical narrative too is seen "as forward motion that moves towards its own beginning, or as a form of advance and recovery, leading toward a final recapitulation." And the same pattern is found especially to obtain theologically and biblically (i.e., historically). By way of recapitulation, the author concludes with a passage from Augustine's Confessions on the nature of time, which "conforms exactly to the movement of terza rima." Comes with six diagrams illustrating the various patterns elaborated in the text.

From Rachel Jacoff's review of Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno:

"John Freccero's Introduction to the translation distills a compelling reading of the Inferno into a few powerful and immediately intelligible pages that make it clear why Freccero is not only a great Dante scholar, but a legendary teacher of the poem as well."

"… we exist in time which, according to Aristotle, "is a kind of middle-point, uniting in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time."* It is further to say that we exist in history, a middleness that, according to Kermode, men try to mitigate by making "fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems." Time and history are the media Dante invokes to begin a text whose narrative journey will strive to imitate– not escape– the journey it undertakes to represent, "il cammin di nostra vita."

* Aristotle is actually referring to the moment, which he considers indistinguishable from time: "Now since time cannot exist and is unthinkable apart from the moment, and the moment is a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time, it follows that there must always be time: for the extremity of the last period of time that we take must be found in some moment, since time contains no point of contact for us except in the moment. Therefore, since the moment is both a beginning and an end there must always be time on both sides of it" (Physics 8.1.251b18-26; in the translation of R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941]).

From Four Quartets:

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Sunday, November 2, 2003

From remarks on Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty in the New York Review of Books, issue dated Nov. 20, 2003, page 48:

"The Russian theorist Bakhtin lends his august authority to what Donoghue's lively conversation has been saying, or implying, all along. 'Beauty does not know itself; it cannot found and validate itself — it simply is.' "

"Goethe's imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:

Time and space merge … into an inseparable unity … a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination… this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space….

Dostoevskii… sought to present the voices of his era in a 'pure simultaneity' unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:

Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii's world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists…. "

Bakhtin's notion of a "chronotope" was rather poorly defined. For a geometric structure that might well be called by this name, see Poetry's Bones and Time Fold. For a similar, but somewhat simpler, structure, see Balanchine's Birthday.

2003 are relevant to our recurring "art wars" theme. The essay on Dante by Judith Shulevitz on page 31 recalls his "point at which all times are present." (See my March 7 entry.) On page 12 there is a review of a novel about the alleged "high culture" of the New York art world. The novel is centered on Leo Hertzberg, a fictional Columbia University art historian. From Janet Burroway's review of What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt:

"…the 'zeros' who inhabit the book… dramatize its speculations about the self…. the spectator who is 'the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas.'''

Here is a canvas by Richard McGuire for April Fools' Day 1995, illustrating such a spectator.

Connoisseurs of ArtSpeak may appreciate Burroway's summary of Hustvedt's prose: "…her real canvas is philosophical, and here she explores the nature of identity in a structure of crystalline complexity."

For another "structure of crystalline
complexity," see my March 6 entry,